Turkish delights

What to do at Hotel Villa Mahal

It would be easy to spend all your time at the hotel,
swimming or kayaking round the floating platform, eating
pide (Turkish pizza), relaxing after a massage in a cave,
dining at the water's edge, perhaps occasionally taking the hotel's
boat to one of the harbour-side restaurants across the bay (try
Trio on the marina).

But then you would miss out on Patara. Stretching back
from an 18km sandy beach, the scattered ruins of this Lycian port
are home to one of the world's first parliament buildings and to
the partially rebuilt, oldest standing lighthouse in the world,
recently unearthed from the shifting sands.